


in the arms of the father

by rosedamask



Category: Penny Dreadful (TV)
Genre: Canon-Typical Pseudo Incest, F/M, Post-Season/Series 02, Prophecy Sex, implied Victor Frankenstein/Ferdinand Lyle
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-22
Updated: 2015-08-22
Packaged: 2018-04-14 22:27:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,355
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4582437
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rosedamask/pseuds/rosedamask
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There is another prophecy, in the Verbis Diablo.</p>
            </blockquote>





	in the arms of the father

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Dancingsalome](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dancingsalome/gifts).



> A gift you, dear recipient! Vanessa Ives is one of my all-time favourite characters, and I've long loved her relationship with Sir Malcolm, so getting to spend some time with this ship has been wonderful. Thank you very much for this assignment, and I really hope this answers some of your wants!
> 
> Acknowledgements:  
>  **I** \- Vanessa quotes from the Emerald Tablet, and Christina Rossetti's "A Hymn." (Also, the whole "set your problematic fave Victorian patriarch's bed on fire" thing owes everything to _Jane Eyre_ ).  
>  **II** \- Poem quoted is John Clare's "An Invitation to Eternity." Parts of Vanessa's Amunet monologue are taken from the Darby Bible Translation of Isaiah 34 (with all the thanks to [originally](http://archiveofourown.org/users/originally) for letting me borrow the idea of Penny Dreadful + Isaiah from the excellent [Possess whatever bliss thou canst devise](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2748683)). All the Verbis Diablo quotes are taken from David J. Peterson's Goodreads FAQ, and apparently translate to "I have the power to kill"/"I am your master now"/"I have power over the beasts of the field."  
>  **III** \- Teeny reference to Keats' "Ode to a Grecian Urn" from Mr Lyle.  
>  **IV** \- References to Blake's "Auguries of Innocence" and Donne's "To His Mistress Going to Bed."

**I.**

Now that it lies kindling in the grate, her crucifix is enough to warm her against the deepening chill of the night. And, as she looks on the slow writhing of the flames, watching how her sad carved saviour has finally succeeded in holding back the shadows for her, Vanessa is returned at last to the edge of sleep.

 _So we must burn alone as well_ , she finds herself thinking, as her mind grows dark in anticipation of dreaming, and her thoughts all come to her in fitful bursts of illumination, like the flickerings of a wind-blown candle. Yet when thoughts fade, and her dreams come to claim her, they each seem to defy the dreadful clarity of this revelation. 

In her dreams, she stands at Sir Malcolm’s door, just as she had in one of the desperate waking fancies that came to her earlier that evening, before she’d resigned her faith to the hearth and herself to her solitude. All is still, in this dream. All is silent. The air is almost black, so thick is it with shadows. Glancing down the hallway with the quick eyes of a thief, she sees how heavily they hang over every corner of the house—like a veil waiting to lifted, like a pall that she would throw aside. Like a weight that she can bear no longer. She lifts her hand, thinking perhaps to knock, yet that isn’t what she does when she sees her cut-wife’s fingers stretched out against the dark. 

Something stirs, in that darkness; something sighs. No, not something— _everything_. The shadows are alive around her, Vanessa realises, her eyes wide and fixed in front of her, no longer daring to look behind. Perhaps she has awakened them with her witch’s hand, or perhaps they’re the servants of her oldest beloved, sent to wait on her whether she wishes them or no; either way, she is beyond all thoughts of knocking, all pretence of daylight modesty. Instead, following one of those old obscure instincts that sleep down in her bones, she pushes at the shadows with something like an enchantress’ wilful grace, the pale curve of her hand eloquent and tremorless in the air. She knows such gestures ought to be impossible, with her throat trembling at every pulse, with her heart beating out its dire warning against her chest, but the dream-shadows have wrapped her up in endless night, and all the boundaries of the possible have been swallowed whole. 

And so it does not startle her when the door moves aside for her without her so much as laying a fingertip on the wood. She does not flinch to see Sir Malcolm laid out in deepest sleep, as undisturbed by her intrusion as a body on a bier. Yet though the shadows have bared all this to her, it is here that they must leave her: Sir Malcolm’s bed is all ablaze, and he sleeps at the heart of a golden inferno. Now the door is open, all is brilliant, all is terrible. The flames licking at the bedposts are so fierce and bright that she does not know whether they are the blazes of heaven or the fires of hell. 

_Quod est inferius est sicut quod est superius_ , she thinks distantly, the words reverberating in her head like a soft echo of all those nights when the Verbis Diablo was a parlour game she had to play with all her best beloveds, a puzzle of bones and black etchings they each bent their heads over. _As above, so below_. Though her eyes are open and unblinking, she crosses the threshold with the leaden steps of a somnambulist, of a girl in a trance on the musical-hall stage. But when she reaches out into the fire and closes her hand over the nearest bedpost with knuckles still unburnt and white, she proves herself a creature beyond any illusionists’ conjuring. 

Sleeping in this veritable forest of flame, Sir Malcolm looks indomitable as ever; carved, immutable, his face a thing of aching strength and stillness. A thing that might have survived from antiquity. _There has always been something of the death mask about it_ , she thinks, crouched above him now. She feels the flames no more than he, even as the fire come tripping along her fingers, climbing her arms like gold-leaved ivy, slowly haloing her hair.

Malcolm’s eyes only open at her touch, at her hand pressed into the queer smooth crux of his jaw. They’re hunter-bright, in the light of the flames, as piercing as the endless black of her Lucifer’s eyes, yet dear to her for all that; as dear as anything she has known in her life. 

“Father of the fatherless,” she hears herself murmuring, without quite understanding how the words have come to her, the verse of her poetry books now another serpent tongue in her mouth. “As thou set me as a mark against thine arrow, as a captive in thy cord, let that cord be love.”

In her dreams, Vanessa kneels at Sir Malcolm’s flaming bedside, head bowed so their foreheads touch, fire kissing fire before unsingeing flesh meets unsingeing flesh, and her hair falling all around them, flame tumbling into flame. “Let that cord be love,” she breathes, with her burning mouth, and kisses him in earnest, long and deep. 

Only with this kiss does she know the warmth of the inferno, coruscating, exquisite.

 

When she wakes, it is in the cool light of the mid-morning sun, and she knows better than to rise, to seek out any last farewell from her dreamed lover, her lost father, the last friend that she might hope to find beneath this roof. She knows she is alone.

**II.**

With Sir Malcolm gone, the house is hers to wander as a ghost. And yet as the nights go by, Vanessa begins to believe that there is mercy in the solitude. Now she has only her own voice for company, she can close her eyes each evening at vesper-bell, and let all the black tongues of antiquity rip through her, the Verbis Diablo choking the air of Grandage Place like a miasma of opium smoke.

It comes more readily to her now, ever since she’s used it to topple the nightcomers’ castle. _Etsi wesrat khedekareb emi_ , she begins each time, for this, at least, she remembers. _Emi nebratronak nüllaan_.

After that, the rest is darkness.

Each time she is returned to her senses, she feels how the echoes of Amunet have risen in her throat, just as her bones have begun rising to meet her flesh. She is glad of it. She is gladder still that none remain to hear these songs of songs, each loud enough to shake the stars down from the sky, if the lingering vibrations in the room are anything to go by. 

Soon, she tells herself, she will master this. Soon, the word of the devil will perch on her tongue like the ornamental French her mother gave her, the kind of unlovely accomplishment that she needs to count herself a woman of the world. The Latin of her childhood prayers can help her no longer, but this might, if she has the fortitude to stay on the path she has chosen for herself. Once, it had thrilled her to think how the camera of Dorian Gray might have stolen away something of her soul, and perhaps this is not so different, this slow forsaking of God’s grace—and yet this does not feel like a surrender, not quite. This feels more as though she is casting aside a great many veils, one cruel syllable at a time, a Salome writhing towards her uncertain prize. 

The willing of it is all that matters, she thinks, and so she goes on, incantation spilling like black typhoid from her lips.

 _Let this language not become easy in your mouth_ , she can still hear Joan Clayton warning her, dimly, as though her voice has been carried to her ear by the mists of Ballentree Moor. _Or soon it will no longer be your mouth but his_. But now she is certain that not even Joan understood what she is. She may be leading herself further into darkness with each tripping of her tongue, but it is a darkness where no other creature presumes to rule beside her. When she casts her tarot, The Devil no longer squats on the other side of her card. Instead, there is only the pale outline of The Empress waiting to greet her, her silhouette a stark and slender thing against her inky kingdom.

And when the incantations take hold, Vanessa dreams only that she walks alone across the poets’ valley-depths of shade, _where the path has lost its way, where the sun forgets the day, where there's nor light nor life to see_ —and she herself its only queen. 

Sometimes, its shadows press down on her so unrelentingly that she half thinks herself buried alive, and she aches to claw through all the bitter blackness of the earth until she can at last rest beside her sweet Mina, in her coffin by the sea. Sometimes, when she reaches for an anchor in this world, she thinks of a slow boat on the Atlantic, and the quicksilver taste of the Verbis Diablo in her throat takes her back to a lightning-lit kiss on the moors. She would curse all those who would dare to lay a hand on Mr Chandler, no matter the sorrow her words would bring him; she would let them know the true savagery of her cut-wife’s cry, if it meant he might only live to look upon her works with those true kind eyes of his. 

And sometimes, when she is lost to the _terra incognito_ of her trances, she thinks of Sir Malcolm. It is then she knows that she would overturn all of the oceans of the world, if only she could reach out from the depths of the sea and draw him close to her once more. She would call down all the swarming plagues of heaven, if it meant the wind would blow him back to her—and perhaps she does, one night, for finally there comes a morning when she is awakened by his footfall belowstairs, his voice calling her as though from leagues away.

When she flies from her bed, he is there before her, his skin darkened by his journey, the harsh lines of his face more brutal than ever, hewn anew by suffering. Her arms are around him in an instant, his new-grown beard brushing against her cheek in rough benediction as he sighs out her name.

“Vanessa—oh, Vanessa, what have I left you to?” 

“Only myself, Sir Malcolm,” she breathes into the thick warmth of his overcoat. For a moment, her heart is so full that she can almost imagine herself back by the sea, a girl again. But when she buries herself in the curve of his shoulder and inhales so deeply it sounds like the prelude to a sob, it is not to steal away any last trace of foreign air still clinging to his skin. When she presses her hand against his ribs, she is not seeking the thrill of an alien heartbeat rising to meet her palm. Somehow, in their months together, in their months apart, his heart against her hand has become as familiar to her as the tremor of her heart own against her breast, his scent the scent of all the blessed homecomings she has ever known. “Only myself.”

When she draws back to look on him, with eyes painted in all the blacks and violets of mourning, she knows he is looking on her as the woman she was always meant to be. 

Still he unflinching in her arms.

 

She does not mean to speak the Verbis Diablo; not on this night for quiet remembrance and the low etudes of comfort, for Sir Malcolm laying open his maps to show her where he parted from Sembene. That doesn’t stop her from waking with the night-sharp taste of Amunet still on her lips, with all the sonorous prayers of antiquity still ringing in her ears—with the hands of Sir Malcolm on her shoulders. 

Vanessa doesn’t hear him calling her name, calling her back to him, not right away. _Mother of evil_ , she hears instead, dreaming that her own voice calls to her across a moonless desert plain, the sands kindling, burning star-bright beneath her feet as she hears an old song blaze through the gloom. _Lay down your head among the flames, lay your head down among the flames, for the arms of the father are open, and there Liliths will settle, and find for themselves a resting place, not one of these shall fail, one shall not have to seek for the other—my mouth, it hath commanded, for now we are beyond—_

When she opens her eyes, she sees Sir Malcolm’s face before her, flicking and golden against the black of night, a face on the burning sands—but then she’s awake, truly awake, and it is only Sir Malcolm’s face lit by the soft glow of the parlour lamps. The dry heat of his palms blisters through the worn cotton of her nightdress, as he shakes her into full wakefulness. 

Her own hands stay gathered mercilessly against the lapels of his dressing gown, though she has not the imperative of fear to keep them there. “Sir Malcolm,” she says, by way of hoarse reassurance. “I must apologise. As you can see, I have not been idle in your absence.”

“Indeed not,” he says slowly, warily, his eyes pale and keen as a sheath knife. “You have had no—visitations?”

“No.” Vanessa lowers her gaze, watching her loose dark hair fall about his hands as she shakes her head. “All my own will.” 

“And do you know what it is you say, Vanessa?” he asks, almost tentative in the devouring quietude of the room.

“More often than I did,” she confesses. Some of it has begun to soak through her mind, sure as blood through linen: when the promise of _etsi wesrat hor fensteru em tekhes_ rests thick in the hollow of her throat, she has no doubt what power she claims. The parlour is near silent, now she has woken, but it is not still: something shivers in the air between them, raising the flesh on her arms as she tilts her chin and asks, “Do you?”

His grip on her falls away, at that, a thin rugsworth of distance stretching out between them before he answers her. “The underworld is one place I have never charted,” he says, poker in hand, a low kindling struck in the fireplace. Pine to keep the chills at bay. “But the words wrenched from Arabic—those I can help you with.”

 

 _Lay your head down_ , are the words they see before them in the end, half a dozen Moroccan leather spines laid open on the table as the consult Sir Malcolm’s books together, in the faded gold light of the lamps and fireplace, the dusty velvet of the draperies holding back the soft blue-greys of a London dawn. _For we are beyond._

Beyond the hope of grace or salvation, she can only presume.

“It’s nothing I couldn’t have told you with my own tongue,” Vanessa says, her smile tired and thin, wrung out of her with all the weary wryness of despair. 

But lay her head down she does, heavy against Sir Malcolm’s arm, sleep an almost peaceful thing when it takes her by the dying light of the hearth.

**III.**

They want for little else, now they are beside each other once more, the lamps burning long and slow all through their nights together. The next time they’re thrust back into the currents of London society, it is to honour the engagement of one Mr Dorian Gray to one Miss Lily Frankenstein—an invitation Vanessa would have gladly consigned to the parlour hearth, if not for the coming of another letter, one marked from Mr Lyle’s address and written in the surgeon’s hand of Doctor Frankenstein.

 _You must go_ , it had read, the words seeming to tremble against the paper, the pen-strokes thin as spider’s legs. _You must see her—only see, and you will know_.

And so here she stands, in gown and curl. This time, she watches the revelry at Sir Malcolm’s side, and sees no drop of blood fall into the pale, foamy sea of guests in satin and pearl—but that doesn’t mean she’s free from all thoughts of a London turned incarnadine. Miss Frankenstein’s white-gloved hands rest clawlike on the shoulders of each man she dances with, something restless within her even as she is spun in circle after circle. 

Perhaps this is what Doctor Frankenstein is so desperate she should see, any twitching portent that suggests there’s still hope for his suit. And yet she’s not so sure that can be all. When she is not being kissed by Mr Gray, Lily’s mouth is set in a sharp pink crescent of a smile, and Vanessa can’t help but think of dimple-cheeked simulacra, of rose-lacquered fetishes, of scorpions swarming under porcelain. _She wouldn’t be the first who smiled and swayed for Dorian, and all the while felt something scratching at her soul_ , Vanessa thinks, and wonders whether she, too, might have earned herself such a ball in time, if she had not fled from him.

“I’m glad you’re here beside me,” she says quietly, her eyes still fixed on the dancers before her, but her head tilting gently towards Sir Malcolm’s shoulder.

“It should never have been otherwise,” is all he says in return. Though they are not pressed together, she imagines she can feel the words reverberating deep in his chest, deep as a voice from a well. She lets her hand close over his, for an instant, lets her fingers curve over a fist half-clenched against the pang of memory.

It is not long after that Mr Lyle finds them on the edges of the ballroom. “And so we are spectators once more,” he says, as the stiffness of the necessary salutations begin to give away to the softer flourishes of observation. “A glittering stage, is it not? Mr Hollingshead himself would weep for shame, at such a feast of jolly twirling devils.” His own handkerchief appears at that, printed lilies falling from his sleeve as unabashedly as daisies tumbling from an upset flower-cart in Covent Garden. “But may I have the honour of the next dance, Miss Ives?” he asks, eyes bright behind the swathe of dabbing silk.

When the music begins anew, something falls from his handkerchief into her grasp—a slip of a thing, thinner than a dance-card, frail like a moth’s wing in her gloveless palm. 

“Another token from Doctor Frankenstein?” she asks, under the protection of the strings playing, her mouth as close to his ear as she can manage at her height. Beyond, the room is whirling brightly, a nursery top spun for the pleasure of a thousand painted eyes, and she can’t be certain whether they’re truly watched by any here.

“Our dear doctor is assisting me with the colder pastorals of the Grecian world,” Mr Lyle tells her, as another couple presses so close to them that one pivot brings a slide of bustle against bustle. “This is something else,” he says, using the excuse of a turn to rise up on the balls of his feet and whisper into her neck, “something that I dare not show you before. Something in the old gods’ tongues.”

Around her, the ball is a blazing sea of diamond and crystal, brilliant as pale hellfire. 

 

She stirs the hearth to life, before she lets Sir Malcolm—still in his hat and scarf—unfurl the parchment. She’s already burnt away her bridge to one God, after all, and she’s no more kindly disposed to any of the others who might rise again to court her soul.

But this is no serpent’s coiled _billet-doux_. Inside the sad little scroll, there are the echoes of an old dream.

 _For the arms of the father are open, and there the mother of evil will settle, and find for herself a resting place, for she is risen beyond all the brothers of hell_ , it reads. The torn edges of the parchment are covered with all the devil’s own curses, teeming thick and black like a plague of locusts on the page.

Her fate translated, silence hangs over the parlour as heavily as it had when she was alone there, a silence that is perhaps about to cleave her heart anew. “His concerns are ill-founded, I’m afraid,” says Vanessa, turning away her unstinging eyes. “Neither the Father above or my father below could withstand me in their arms for long. I have no home there, not anymore.”

She hears Sir Malcolm follow her as she sweeps from the parlour to the foyer, feels him watching her as she begins to climb the stairs. Like so many of the things that shadow her in this life, all those fierce, fitful things that she has half-feared and half-desired, the weight of his gaze rests on her shoulders as heavy and familiar as a well-worn mantle.

“Vanessa,” he says from below. “Do you remember what I said, when we were in that wretched theatre?”

As she turns her head, she sees, from the corner of her eye, how her skirts linger on each step behind her, silks pooling in dark invitation. Vanessa thinks of the blood they say crept out from under Gladys’ door, and she does not trust herself enough to turn back any further. “Of course,” she says, climbing another step, and then another, her gown-hem falling in a trail that would lead Sir Malcom upwards, ever upwards.

“And do you imagine that I am so easily burnt?” he asks, unravelling his scarf with hands that some might call untrembling—some, but not Vanessa. 

Something primordial quickens within her, an old dream whispering at her ear now, low as a shush of silk against the stair. _Now we are risen beyond all the brothers of hell_ , she thinks, as she hears Sir Malcolm’s footfall on the landing behind her.

**IV.**

Sir Malcolm is very still, as she leans into him from the doorway of her bedroom. “No,” he says, near hoarse already, when she takes his hands and tries to bring them down bruisingly to her whalebone-cradled waist. “No, Vanessa, I—if we are to do this, I don’t think it should be as it might have been before.”

There is a moment when Vanessa isn’t certain whether she should take this for insult, when she is almost ready to bristle and scratch at his words again, as she did when they were first brought together over by the desertions of Mina. But then she thinks of Evelyn Poole’s dark eyes, and all the fever-dreams they promised. When her hand is at Sir Malcolm’s cheek, it is a gentle thing. “No, I wouldn’t have that either,” she tells him, keeping her countenance as steady as she knows how. “Perhaps you’d care to wait, while I undress for bed?”

Sir Malcolm watches in the open door, as she sinks into the chair before her mirror. Slowly, the pins begin to slide from her hair.

It will not be as it might have been in her cut-wife’s hut with Mr Chandler, when the winds of the world had not blown them apart and she needed only her oldest wools and leathers to keep her warm as they danced through storms and starless nights. It will not be as it was with Dorian Gray, when she knelt half-veiled in silks and shadows, laying all her darkness bare to him. 

Tonight, it is a quiet evening in Grandage Place, with only the rattling of a carriage in the street beyond to interrupt the midnight stillness of their square, and her mirror reflects the last vestiges of ballroom respectability that still cling to her in the curled hair at her temples and the glint of garnets at her throat. No, it will not be _as it might have been before—_ , whatever visions of depravity Sir Malcolm had in his mind when he said the words. And how could it be otherwise, with them? No doubt if the rest of the world could look on them, they’d say that this night is something that should never be, but even this thought is oddly calming to her, as she bends to rid herself of her shoes. There is no question of what should be, between her and Sir Malcolm: there is only what they are, and all that they have sworn to be together.

And, perhaps, what fate would have them be.

For the arms of the father are open, and there the mother of evil will settle, and find a home for herself there.

With pale, careful hands, she unravels the silver intricacies of her necklace, unclasps her earrings, and sets down her jewels on the table before her. In this light, they look like a gleaming tarot spread she isn’t certain she knows how to read, though the sight of them against the burnished wood of her dresser remains a strange dark promise unto itself. And it will be a promise fulfilled, she tells herself: neither she nor Sir Malcolm are the kind to turn back, however uncertain the path. With pale, careful hands, she takes up the heavier silver of her hairbrush, and begins to sweep away the remains of her twilight handiwork. All this she does in silence, until Sir Malcolm says, “Let me,” and moves from the doorway at last, his gait slow and portentous as a mountain uprooting itself and coming to her at her bidding. 

_You never did this for Mina_ , she thinks, with her hair threaded between his fingers. The slow pull of the brush in his hand makes her want to lower her eyelids, words floating through her head as hazily as those in an opium dream, even those she would once have spat at him in rage. _And I have allowed this from no man but you. I know how it burns, your guilt—oh, how I know._

Sir Malcolm’s eyes have grown very dark, by the time they meet hers in the mirror; not the black she saw when the serpent took his form, but another kind of darkening altogether, a darkening that says the sight of her is as sweet a poison as the ones that she once learned of when she and Joan plucked and hung nightshade together.

“Do you know that I thought I might bury myself in Africa, after all?” he asks the Vanessa of the looking-glass, bristles stilling as he studies their reflections. “With Sembene gone, I thought of how easily I might lose my way, without a guide. And yet in every polestar, it was your face I saw.” The brush he lays aside with the jewels, the better to touch her cheek, pale between the black of her hair, her gown. “How right I was,” he says, at last. 

There is no accusation in his voice, though she remains the compass to lead him away from any pretence of absolution. Vanessa draws his head down into a kiss as deep as the sea's undertow, letting the mirror reflect what it will, letting the glass bears witness to their first true lovers’ touch. When she rises from the dressing table, she rises into his waiting hands, unrushed as every lace is unravelled, each veil set aside. It feels as though those hands are on her skin long before her clothes are left to the floor, so warm are they. Although she works at him with all the careful intimacy she’s learned under this roof, still she is near-certain that he can feel the scorpion quickness of her own fingertips as they strip away all the ivory-fine armour of evening dress.

She is not laid out on the bed by an easeful death that wears his face, this time. Instead, she alone comes to sit on the edge of the mattress, its linen barely creased by her weight, memories of long-lost devotionals stirring in her mind even when Sir Malcolm kneels before her at the side of her bed, his hands slow as a cartographer’s over all that is white and sharp and deathlike in her body. His mouth is reverence itself when he kisses at the wax-pale hollows and swells of her throat, yet when he turns his head to the darkening rose flesh at the tips of her breasts, at the heart of her cunt, he still worships as a true night-creature. 

As he might if it were she he found, in the centre of a maze.

“Soft,” she says, half-madly, again and again, when she has fallen across the bed at last. Her tongue and his are both as ceaseless as the whispering of an undine’s brook, and she is not certain whether she speaks of his mouth at her cunt or the tendrils of light that are beginning to bloom behind her eyes. “Soft now,” she says, faintheaded, her wild laughter almost trembling in the air between them as Sir Malcolm lifts his head, beard glistening in beautiful obscenity. 

Stars are already swarming across her vision like hundreds of fire-winged scarabs, as he rises to kiss her. Yet it is not until atop her, inside her, his mortal arms and beating heart and death’s-mask face all opened to her, that she begins to truly feel herself pass from shadow into flame.

“The scroll could’ve meant the Father above, for all I care,” Sir Malcolm grinds out, voice like the first tremors of a thunderstorm, “and I’d still feel it was meant for me. You are—everything, oh—everything.”

Perhaps this should be a moment of tender, humbling awe, as she has always imagined it must be for poets when they find their heaven cupped in the dark petals of a wildflower; perhaps she should feel claimed, as she might if Sir Malcolm had named her _his America, his newfound land_. And yet—primordial fire is singing in her veins, when her release takes her, her every nerve storm-bright even as she feels herself crashing through endless darkness, crying out in a tongue that is beyond all prayer to heaven or to hell.

She does not fall alone, this night; she does not burn alone.

**V.**

“This bed may have survived Satan himself," Sir Malcolm says, when the world is shadows and half-lights again, "but I fear it will never survive the two of us." He nods to the thinly-wrought spires of the headboard, stark and thin as all else in this room.

Strange, to think that there was ever a time she thought she would walk on from this house, walk on and wander through the valleys of the dead alone.

“Be that as it may,” she says, low and lilting, entirely loving, sounding more like herself than she ever has beyond the confines of the cut-wife’s walls, her hand curved around his head, "the relics would have it that I am Amunet herself, and I say you shall say.”

There is no need of her to call on the Verbis Diablo, here in this bed. Malcolm’s hands are heavy and languid at her ribcage, her temple, brushing at her ruined curls once more, his mouth breathing her in wherever it alights. “As you would have it, daughter mine,” he whispers, hoarse as a prayer after weeping, his head bowed to her breast as though in some sweet penance, until she sinks to kiss him, sighing into his mouth as he drinks her up once more. All is tender as the fire of dawn against a darkling sky.

And when sleeps comes to claim them, there is no desert of shadow or forest of flame that their embrace does not endure.


End file.
